“What began as one horrific attack 13 years ago and a simple, 60-word Authorization for the Use of Military Force three days later has morphed all but unnoticed into a war with no name or parameters—against an enemy that the government will no longer even officially identify, on battlefields that didn’t exist when the measure hurriedly passed Congress.

And as the Yemen strike suggests, the war hardly appears to be winding down. Nor do U.S. forces seem to be getting much better at avoiding “collateral damage.” The grave but very real danger is that this strangest of wars will never end, certainly not before the expiration of Obama’s second term. And his successors may be left with nearly the entire unresolved mess: an open-ended war authorization and inchoate rules for drone and special operations, the promised-but-never-carried-through closing of Guantánamo Bay, and a National Security Agency that’s still not sure whom or what it can spy on.”

The elephant in the racialised room: The conundrum of Black-Arabness by Bedour Alagraa

“I’m here to assert that Afro-Arabs and Black Arabs do exist. Not only do we exist, we create a necessary tension in the articulations of Brownness/Blackness, we disturb the rigidity of the Black/Brown/Yellow/Indigenous markers that fall under the juggernaut ‘Person of Colour’ identifier, and we inspire a necessary appreciation of the multiplicities that might be produced within this rather dogmatic racial order.”